A great many wrapping machines are known in the art. Applicant will submit a separate statement of known prior art but the prior art may be summarized by saying that wrapping machines for such products as paper towels and napkins, rolls of tissue, and the like for wrapping individual products or groups of products have not been able to achieve the high speeds which are now needed to wrap economically the output of other machines now available for producing the products. Either it has been necessary to provide an undue number of wrapping machines and to divide product streams among them or other machinery must be operated at the speeds previous wrapping machines could sustain. One reason for such limitations has been changes in the directions of movement of a product as it was being wrapped. Such a change imposes an upper limit on wrapping speed, particularly if the change is a deviation from the direction of movement of the product and then a return to the previous path. Stopping and starting of the product or great changes in speed impose similar limitations. In order to speed the flow of products through the wrapping machine it was necessary to devise a number of novel mechanisms and to interconnect them in such a way that either a single product or a group of products could be oriented with respect to the path through the wrapping machine and passed along that path with substantially continuous motion while being wrapped.
The machine will be described with greater particularity below but in addition to the advantage that the product moves substantially in a line and substantially at a single speed which allows very high wrapping speeds, my structure has the advantage of producing a seal to secure the wrapper at the narrow rear face of the product group rather than on the broad face, permitting a neater package with better arrangement of the text which appears on the wrapper. My device also contains a number of novel mechanisms for assuring that the wrapper remains smooth and to pass the wrapper about the product in a unique way and contains novel means for cooperation between elements of conveyors, the wrapper, and the product to bring separate products of a product group tightly together just before the wrapper is closed and sealed to produce a tight neat package at speeds which are easily twice those achievable before.